


Reasoning

by HachiKamaitachi



Category: Hellsing
Genre: Gen, Smoking, Vampire Turning, Virginity
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-31
Updated: 2012-10-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 10:09:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 715
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/550430
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HachiKamaitachi/pseuds/HachiKamaitachi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing smoked cigars for two reasons, and was a virgin for one.  One-shot.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reasoning

Sir Integra Fairbrook Wingates Hellsing smoked cigars for two reasons, and was a virgin for one.

Firstly, the cigars reminded her of her father, who had smoked the same brand. She might have felt guilty about the expense, except that every time she tasted the bitterness on her tongue it was like her father was standing next to her, instead of the monster he’d left behind for her bodyguard. It was a comfort, and everyone was allowed their small comforts. If she had to deal with a storm of ghouls, a psychopathic vampire and her own weight in paperwork every week, she was going to have her God damned cigars.

Secondly, she liked the looks she got when people saw her light up.

She was still a reasonably young woman; heading towards her middle-age but certainly not old enough to have started smoking before people knew about the health dangers. She was upper class and well educated. She’d spent her youth at a private school learning to ride ponies and wearing skirts at least as long as her knees, not being peer-pressured to smoke by children trying to look like the parents they hated.

The looks of confusion (and occasionally faint disgust) from her peers when she took a drag from her expensive cigars gave her a small reminder. She could read their minds through their faces, and knew that every one of them was thinking,

_Doesn’t she know those things will kill her?_

She did know. She knew as soon as she picked the tube of tobacco out of its tin. She knew, and it reminded her that someday – maybe someday soon – she was going to die.

She spent too much time fighting immortals, alongside the greatest immortal of them all, and sometimes she began to feel as though she might live forever herself. She’d killed enough monsters that claimed they could never die: perhaps she was the biggest and scariest monster of them all. The great Alucard was at her beck and call. If he was only the servant then, well… how powerful must the master be?

And then she smoked her cigar and saw their faces and she knew how powerful she was: not at all.

If Alucard were to light up a cigarette no one would even blink. He was immortal. He had already been old when she was born but he would outlive her and everyone she knew. But this tiny thing – these little burning leaves breathed into her lungs – was enough to kill her. Slowly and painfully, her cigars would be the death of her, and she smoked them purely to remember that.

However, this little reminder of her mortality came with another feeling: one decidedly more human and, to Integra, unforgivably weak.

_I don’t want to die…_

She barely allowed herself to think of it, and certainly never admitted it to Alucard. She couldn’t bear the thought of his smug, sharp grin and the laughter that would ring through the halls of the Hellsing house. She would not bring such shame upon her ancestors, not while she still had breath.

But when she had no breath anymore…

Integra’s virginity was no secret. She let people know as though it didn’t matter to her; as if the people she rolled around in the sheets with (or didn’t, as the case was) were not a private matter but one she’d discuss as happily as the colour of her shirts.

_Let them see me as a shining white tower of purity,_ she thought, although she had too much blood on her hands to really give a crap about purity anymore. _Let them think I never found a man I thought worthy of me. Let them call me uptight and old fashioned. Let them say I wear a chastity belt to bed each night. Let them call me anything but afraid._

Integra was scared to die, and even more scared of death’s exit clause, but that wasn’t going to stop her from using it when there was no more breath in her lungs. She liked to think that she’d be braver than that: that she’d die proudly with her humanity intact, but she wasn’t sure that she wouldn’t just let Alucard laugh at her before he swept down and bit her neck.


End file.
